US workplace AI use crossed a line in Q2 2026: 52% of employees now use AI in their role, up from 21% in Q2 2023, per Gallup’s May 6–20, 2026 survey of 22,573 employed adults. Firm-level counts read far lower, near 18%. This post lays out what each survey measures, how the numbers moved, and what workers report doing with the tools. AI Adoption at Work 52% of US employees use AI in their role, Gallup Q2 2026 15% use AI daily, up from 4% in Q2 2023 47% say their organization has in...

Apparently left-handed people can't use a fountain pen as the left hand smudges the ink as they write. I call bullshit on that. I'm left-handed, and I use a fountain pen just fine - even with an "overhand" grip. I read this post from Neal Stephenson a few days ago (thanks to Sal for sharing it), where Neal - a professional, left-handed writer who writes his books with a pen and paper - shares some of his experience and advice on writing with a fountain pen. I've been back using fountain...

Authors: Ying Li , Arjun Rao , Shradha Sehgal Introduction Recommendations sit at the heart of the Netflix experience. Our current production models rely on thousands of hand‑crafted features over users, items, and interactions, along with specialized architectures for sequence modeling, feature interactions, and multi‑task objectives. This stack has evolved over many years to support diverse content types (movies, series, games, live, podcasts) and product surfaces, but its complexity m...

I had another of those I’m living in the future moments today when I was at an electronics retailer, and I saw a 1 TB MicroSD card. I couldn’t afford it of course, but its mere existence shook me in a way I wasn’t expecting. One terabyte . On a thing the size of my thumbnail. Heck, even this picture of a card from my preferred vendor is likely larger than the card itself, depending on your viewport: The 486SX tower my dad brought home before I started school had a one hundred ...

On my 22nd birthday, two years ago, I had a pretty pleasant day. I don't really remember what about it was good, I probably had an enjoyable task at work and a good time with collegues; and in my good mood, I also went down to the book shop right outside my workplace and picked up War and Peace. The cashier made a little comment as he scanned the book, apparently impressed or surprised. Why'd I pick it up? Well, why would anyone want to read the book? Because it's a classic and everyone says ...

making notes and reviewing quotes, collected from day and night: here, there are stories. i revel in observing, and in place- making. where am i? how do i feel? what does this mean to me? i think of the melody of words their cadence and shape and tense and from all, i feel:. from words, wonder; with words, wonder. making notes and reviewing quotes, collected from day and night: here, there are stories. i revel in observing, and in place- making. where am i? how do i feel? what does this mean to...

I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers, is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions. If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free from leanpub. This has been a long time in the making. Formal logic is an incredibly powerful tool to understand software. Everything from “what’s a left outer join” to “why shouldn’t Square inherit from Rect” makes more sense if you know...

Amodei in his latest blog post wrote a mix of agreeable things and things that I believe misrepresent where the real risk of AI is located. I want to focus my attention on why, among all the risks, open weight models constitute the mildest one. I write these words as a person who strongly believes AI may be very dangerous in the near future: 1. Exactly like what happened during the OpenAI / HF incident (which was a joke, but focus on the modalities, not the outcomes), the first serious AI inc...

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too. I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backup...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Thursday, 30 July, 2026 in Portland, Oregon and a dog just came to sit down next to me. 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies This is the last call to register for this week’s How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies , this Friday 31 July 2026, at 9am PT. You want more? Find out about and register for upcoming shows , plus watch previous shows on YouTube . 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Adjust Your Register ...

A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material. Chinese battery manufacturer CATL alone had more than 1,000 people devoted to solid-state battery research as of 2024, and battery manufacturers like BYD , LG , and Samsung are also working on the technology. US and European startups making solid-state batteries have collectively raised over $4 billion as of 2025 . Solid-state ...

Go’s proposal for package flag was accepted on July 23, 2026. It fixes an awkward case in programs that read the same setting from command-line flags, environment variables, and defaults. Suppose a server has a -debug flag whose default is false: fs := flag . NewFlagSet ( "serve" , flag . ContinueOnError ) debug := fs . Bool ( "debug" , false , "enable debug logging" ) if err := fs . Parse ( args ); err != nil { return err } The serv...

Sheesh, 162 links this month. What is going ON? There is just too much interesting material being written, and that’s after filtering out clanker slop. I’m pretty sure I need to curtail the scope of these link posts at some point. I added the 🔥 emoji a while back to make it easier for folk to just skim for the top links. It’s been a quiet blogging month for me, with just one post capturing my rant on LinkedIn about companies using LLMs to write content…to feed to LLMs. Thi...

Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we send punctuation to a frontier AI model 649 times and take notes on what crawls out. The night of July 27th, a weird Claude behavior was making the rounds on X. A thread from @merlindru (187K views) flagged a strange Opus 5 failure mode around a specific text, and @fdosmither followed up with a sharper observation about a related trigger: a spaced - - - divider seemed to confuse Claude into treating the user’s turn as unfinished — his s...

Originally published on Rails At Scale . We recently enabled a really cool feature in ZJIT that makes it feel like a Real Compiler™: the inliner! We’ll write more about it soon. In this post, we’ll talk about one excellent concrete benefit we are already seeing and how it optimizes blocks in pretty much every Ruby program. I’ll start off with a refresher on how blocks work in the Ruby interpreter, then show you how ZJIT understands and optimizes that bytecode, and then show you th...

In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn’t admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn’t admit he was a repulsive human being. I’m seeing the same thing with AI: because it’s unethical, one side won’t acknowledge that it’s useful, but because it’s useful, the other side won’t acknowledge that it’s unethical. Time to make another cup of tea… In his essay on S...

TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more features can we ship? How much cheaper can we build software? I think that’s the wrong question, but I understand why. The first thing AI became good at w...

One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a trickle: once or twice a year somebody would say that an LLM came up with a proof, and then everyone would argue over whether that counted as “real” mathematical innovation. In 2026, it’s a flood. Almost every day I see some new LLM-produced mathematical result. Prompt “engineering” Perhaps the most curious thing about these AI discoveries is how easy...

What's up on the smolweb? July 2026 roundup 2026-07-30 06:15 Summer is here, the big web is choking on AI slop, and the smolweb keeps quietly growing. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in July 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,500 active capsules On July 26, Techrights reported that the Lupa crawler (the main Geminispace survey) now lists 4,761 total capsules , with 3,487 recently connected . That is up from 3,400 in April 20...

One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the process of building our (first! exciting!) home, which is an absolute whirlwind of choices and decisions. Maybe it’s where we’re both programmers, but particularly for m...

TAIPEI (July 29, 2026) — Shield AI and Thunder Tiger Corp. today announced the successful completion of Hivemind’s first multi-asset autonomous teaming demonstration on water, validating Shield AI’s Hivemind AI pilot aboard Thunder Tiger SeaShark unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in a coordinated mission. During the demonstration in Pingtung, Taiwan, Thunder Tiger’s SeaShark 600 and SeaShark 800 USVs equipped with Hivemind autonomously executed a coordinated intelligence, surveillance, a...

There is nothing I hate more than doing self-promotion. The idea of talking about something I’m doing, I’ve done, or I'm going to do makes my skin crawl. But the opposite, promoting things other people are doing—especially friends—fills me with so much joy that I’ll never miss out on the opportunity of doing it. And that’s why I’m excited to let you know that my longtime friend Mattia is about to embark on another of his trips, this time touching Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan,...

Today, the world is made of people. This gives people a tiny measure of leverage: factory workers can sabotage the machines and halt production, truck drivers can strike and halt the entire economy, the police can stand back and let a protest topple the government , the military can mutiny . This sets a limit to how much the powerful can abuse the powerless: no matter how powerful someone is, how much money they have, how many divisions they command, they are still embedded in a society. They ...